The question ‘What is an OzNome Project?’ Or ‘How does a project qualify to be OzNomic?’ is asked regularly. In some respects, it could be asked that all IT projects could be considered OzNomic. This, however, would not be a useful definition. The following seeks to provide an answer to the question.

What is OzNome?

In seeking to answer this question, it’s first useful to start with a definition of OzNome from which we can work. OzNome is founded on a number of related hypotheses. These are:

The success of future economies will be underpinned by their ability to maximise the value generated from data.

No single individual can generate all possible value from a piece of data. Thus, to maximise the value that can be generated requires that the data be shared by those who have it with all those who can generate value from it.

The major challenges to be overcome to realise this vision are the many social and technical challenges associated with the sharing of data.

The solution to these challenges will be the development and adoption of an economy wide information infrastructure.

At present, the OzNome Initiative assumes Statement 1 to be correct and hence the majority of activity is around Statements 2-4.

OzNome Projects

Given the description of OzNome above, it follows that an OzNomic project is a project that seeks either to:

test some element of one or more of these statements;

understand the nature of one or more of the challenges associated with these statements;

realise the value promised by these statements through implementation of one or more elements of the proposed information infrastructure;

improve on the efficiency and\or effectiveness of one or more of the elements of the proposed infrastructure; or

exploit the proposed infrastructure to generate new value from available data.

The OzNome Initiative will involve research activities. However, significant non-research activity will also be required in order to achieve the vision above. The OzNome Business Case defines a number of different classification methods for OzNomic projects. The first of these is a distinction between OzNome Core projects and OzNome Implementation projects. Under this classification method Type A and B projects (above) will tend to be OzNome Core activities whilst Type C - E projects will more likely be implementation projects.

OzNome Research Projects

Not all OzNome projects will involve research. However, all of the 5 criteria above will require research activities in order to achieve the goals of the initiatives.